My notes on things I make for myself and for the enjoyment of my family and friends

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A lightweight shopping bag made from the fabric of a broken umbrella. Roll it up into a tiny parcel and it won’t take much room in your handbag. Now where is that umbrella I bought from the Van Gogh Museum? Not thrown away I hope!

Leave two sections of the fabric together to form the front and another two to make the back. The sides are made of one section folded in half and turned upside down. The side sections start about 5 cm (2″) up from the bottom seam to give the handles a little more length. I unraveled the seams, if you cut them you’ll get a slightly smaller bag.

Cut a triangle from the top of the front and back sections and rounded bits to form handles for the side pieces.

Reinforce the center seams. Sew the the side seams twice: fold along the first seam and sew a second time near the edge.

Cut some tape (about 2.5cm/1″ wide) from the left over pieces to turn the top edges of the bag with. First sew the tape onto the right side. Then fold it double over to the inside and sew along the seam from the right side.

Sew the top of the handles together folding the seam inside and reinforcing (welt or french seam?).

Fold wide pleats to the back and front of the bottom seam and sew a double seam along the bottom edge.

Sew on the attaching strip (the one you had on one of the leftover pieces) to the top and adjust the length. I had to sew a new piece of velcro to replace the worn out one.

It’s not often that I get to wear an evening gown, but this week-end a friend of mine celebrated her doctoral degree in the traditional way. She was dressed in a black long dress, which I had the honour of making for her and the guests got to put on their best and look quite “academic” in their tails. For my own dress I decided to cut corners a bit by just adding a hem to my ready made tunic. I made these silver wire earrings from the same jade beads as my old bracelet and necklace to complement the sea green attire.

The bead is threaded onto one end of the wire and then the wire is just wound irregularly around the bead. I used a 1mm thick silver coated wire and added one dangling bead. The clips are glued on with super glue.

I added some extra glamour to my dress by making a flower out of the same silk as the hem and attaching it near the neckline.

I gathered the stitching around the petals a little to make them curl in slightly, tacked them together overlapping each one and pulled the thread tight to gather them into a flower shape.

A long length of tulle is gathered both under and over the silk petals and some silver beads sewn in the middle to give the finishing touch.

To prepare for the summer holidays I made this little top out of my husband’s old worn out shirt. You can easily make the pattern with a top that fits you – if it’s a knit just make sure you take measurements before cutting!

I moved the back to the front, the pocket to the other side and made bias tape from the sleeves to turn the neckline and armholes. I also added a dart to the side seam for a better fit. Next time I’ll make a new little pocket cut on the bias too to make it stand out a bit more.

This year’s top fashion colour – rose quarz – seems to have been the theme of my posts just lately. I decided to dye my tatted new earrings from the previous post that colour too to go with my pale pink cardigan. After my experiments of dyeing with avocado skins I’ve been reading a lot about natural dyes. Many plants that seem like obvious material for dyeing – blueberries for example that make a dreadful mess when you don’t want them to – are apparently not very colourfast as textile dyes. But I had some old blackcurrant juice that was going to be thrown away anyway so I warmed it up and threw my earrings in it. To make the colour a little more vivid I added a few blueberries too. They came out pretty much the colour I wanted 🙂 and I won’t have to wash them very often…

Blackcurrant

The crocheted earrings I dyed with coffee. I didn’t want the colour to be very even so I first dropped them into the boiling hot liquid for a while for a lighter colour, dried them in between, and then soaked the tips in the coffee again for a darker colour.

Coffee

I wore the pink earrings and my daughter the brown ones (with her pink dress) for the graduation parties last weekend. Both were complemented so I guess I’ll be making more of these!

This is really easy and fun! The internet is full of inspiring photos and blog posts about natural dyes and dyeing techniques, see textile artist Ruth Singer’s fantastic work for example. In her blog I stumbled across something I had to try straight away: dyeing with avocado!

I put all the “ingredients” in at one go: the skins of two avocados, some bits and pieces I found to experiment on and enough water to cover them. First it looked like nothing was happening but after simmering slowly for about an hour I could see the browny rose colour appearing. I also added the pits half way after reading that they too would give some colour to the dye. After two hours I left the fabrics in the saucepan to cool. The next day I rinsed them and put them to dry. I’m very happy with the peachy pink the textiles turned, although I have no clue as to how well the colour would keep in the wash. To see more on this subject go and see this gorgeous post by The Felting and Fibre Studio!

This was surprising! I imagined that after being soaked in the dye for the whole night there would be no trace of the butterfy motif I had sewed fast onto two sides of the folded old hanky, but there you go, blocking the colour this way did work after all 🙂

The sleeves of my bathrobe ended up too short so I lengthened them by sewing on some lace. Being one of my favourite colours I had some linen yarn of the same green in my stash that I could use to crochet the lace edgings. I undid the cuff, turned a narrow hem onto the right side and sewed the lace onto the edge of the sleeves. And gained nearly three more centimeters 🙂

I had to replace the curtains in the changing room of our country sauna after ruining the old ones in the wash. I was going to sew some of my lace edgings onto the old ones, but had to buy some new linen instead.